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sumário one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen 5 15 23 39 49 59 73 83 95 99 103 115 125 3[close]
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4 fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen idph 135 143 149 157 165 http www.idph.net[close]
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one a squat grey building of only thirty-four stories over the main entrance the words central london hatchery and conditioning centre and in a shield the world state s motto community identity stability the enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north cold for all the summer beyond the panes for all the tropical heat of the room itself a harsh thin light glared through the windows hungrily seeking some draped lay figure some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory wintriness responded to wintriness the overalls of the workers were white their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber the light was frozen dead a ghost only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance lying along the polished tubes like butter streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables and this said the director opening the door is the fertilizing room bent over their instruments three hundred fertilizers were plunged as the director of hatcheries and conditioning entered the room in the scarcely breathing silence the absent-minded soliloquizing hum or whistle of absorbed concentration a troop of newly arrived students very young pink and callow followed nervously rather abjectly at the director s heels each of them carried a notebook in which whenever the great man spoke he desperately scribbled straight from the horse s mouth it was a rare privilege the d h c for central london always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments just to give you a general idea he would explain to them for of course some sort of general idea they must have if they were to do their work intelligentlythough as little of one if they were to be good and happy members of society as possible for particulars as every one knows make for virture and happiness generalities are intellectually necessary evils not philosophers but fretsawyers 5[close]
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6 and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society idph to-morrow he would add smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality you ll be settling down to serious work you won t have time for generalities meanwhile meanwhile it was a privilege straight from the horse s mouth into the notebook the boys scribbled like mad tall and rather thin but upright the director advanced into the room he had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth just covered when he was not talking by his full floridly curved lips old young thirty fifty fifty-five it was hard to say and anyhow the question didn t arise in this year of stability a f 632 it didn t occur to you to ask it i shall begin at the beginning said the d.h.c and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks begin at the beginning these he waved his hand are the incubators and opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes the week s supply of ova kept he explained at blood heat whereas the male gametes and here he opened another door they have to be kept at thirty five instead of thirty-seven full blood heat sterilizes rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs still leaning against the incubators he gave them while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages a brief description of the modern fertilizing process spoke first of course of its surgical introduction the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of society not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months salary continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature salinity viscosity referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept and leading his charges to the work tables actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities counted and transferred to a porous receptacle how and he now took them to watch the operation this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa-at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre he insisted and how after ten minutes the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents re-examined how if any of the eggs remained unfertilized it was again immersed and if necessary yet again how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators where the alphas and betas remained until definitely bottled while the gammas deltas and epsilons were brought out again after only thirty-six hours to undergo bokanovsky s process http www.idph.net[close]
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idph 7 bokanovsky s process repeated the director and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks one egg one embryo one adult-normality but a bokanovskified egg will bud will proliferate will divide from eight to ninety-six buds and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo and every embryo into a full-sized adult making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before progress essentially the d.h.c concluded bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development we check the normal growth and paradoxically enough the egg responds by budding responds by budding the pencils were busy he pointed on a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box another rack-full was emerging machinery faintly purred it took eight minutes for the tubes to go through he told them eight minutes of hard x-rays being about as much as an egg can stand a few died of the rest the least susceptible divided into two most put out four buds some eight all were returned to the incubators where the buds began to develop then after two days were suddenly chilled chilled and checked two four eight the buds in their turn budded and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol consequently burgeoned again and having budded-bud out of bud out of bud-were thereafter-further arrest being generally fatal-left to develop in peace by which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety six embryos a prodigious improvement you will agree on nature identical twins-but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide actually by dozens by scores at a time scores the director repeated and flung out his arms as though he were distributing largesse scores but one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay my good boy the director wheeled sharply round on him can t you see can t you see he raised a hand his expression was solemn bokanovsky s process is one of the major instruments of social stability major instruments of social stability standard men and women in uniform batches the whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines the voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm you really know where you are for the first time in history he quoted the planetary motto community identity stability grand words if we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole http www.idph.net[close]
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8 problem would be solved idph solved by standard gammas unvarying deltas uniform epsilons millions of identical twins the principle of mass production at last applied to biology but alas the director shook his head we can t bokanovskify indefinitely ninety-six seemed to be the limit seventy-two a good average from the same ovary and with gametes of the same male to manufacture as many batches of identical twins as possible-that was the best sadly a second best that they could do and even that was difficult for in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity but our business is to stabilize the population at this moment here and now dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century-what would be the use of that obviously no use at all but podsnap s technique had immensely accelerated the process of ripening they could make sure of at least a hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years fertilize and bokanovskify-in other words multiply by seventy-two-and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins all within two years of the same age and in exceptional cases we can make one ovary yield us over fifteen thousand adult individuals beckoning to a fair-haired ruddy young man who happened to be passing at the moment mr foster he called the ruddy young man approached can you tell us the record for a single ovary mr foster sixteen thousand and twelve in this centre mr foster replied without hesitation he spoke very quickly had a vivacious blue eye and took an evident pleasure in quoting figures sixteen thousand and twelve in one hundred and eighty-nine batches of identicals but of course they ve done much better he rattled on in some of the tropical centres singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred and mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark but then they have unfair advantages you should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary it s quite astonishing when you re used to working with european material still he added with a laugh but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging still we mean to beat them if we can i m working on a wonderful delta-minus ovary at this moment only just eighteen months old over twelve thousand seven hundred children already either decanted or in embryo and still going strong we ll beat them yet that s the spirit i like cried the director and clapped mr foster on the shouder come along with us and give these boys the benefit of your expert http www.idph.net[close]
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idph knowledge mr foster smiled modestly with pleasure they went 9 in the bottling room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity flaps of fresh sow s peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came shooting up in little lifts from the organ store in the sub-basement whizz and then click the lifthatches hew open the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand take the flap insert smooth-down and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the endless band whizz click another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths ready to be slipped into yet another bottle the next of that slow interminable procession on the band next to the liners stood the matriculators the procession advanced one by one the eggs were transferred from their test-tubes to the larger containers deftly the peritoneal lining was slit the morula dropped into place the saline solution poured in and already the bottle had passed and it was the turn of the labellers heredity date of fertilization membership of bokanovsky groupdetails were transferred from test-tube to bottle no longer anonymous but named identified the procession marched slowly on on through an opening in the wall slowly on into the social predestination room eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index said mr foster with relish as they entered containing all the relevant information added the director brought up to date every morning and co-ordinated every afternoon on the basis of which they make their calculations so many individuals of such and such quality said mr foster distributed in such and such quantities the optimum decanting rate at any given moment unforeseen wastages promptly made good promptly repeated mr foster if you knew the amount of overtime i had to put in after the last japanese earthquake he laughed goodhumouredly and shook his head the predestinators send in their figures to the fertilizers who give them the embryos they ask for and the bottles come in here to be predestined in detail http www.idph.net[close]
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10 after which they are sent down to the embryo store where we now proceed ourselves idph and opening a door mr foster led the way down a staircase into the basement the temperature was still tropical they descended into a thickening twilight two doors and a passage with a double turn insured the cellar against any possible infiltration of the day embryos are like photograph film said mr foster waggishly as he pushed open the second door they can only stand red light and in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer s afternoon the bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus the hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air give them a few figures mr foster said the director who was tired of talking mr foster was only too happy to give them a few figures two hundred and twenty metres long two hundred wide ten high he pointed upwards like chickens drinking the students lifted their eyes towards the distant ceiling three tiers of racks ground floor level first gallery second gallery the spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery faded away in all directions into the dark near them three red ghosts were busily unloading demijohns from a moving staircase the escalator from the social predestination room each bottle could be placed on one of fifteen racks each rack though you couldn t see it was a conveyor traveling at the rate of thirty-three and a third centimetres an hour two hundred and sixty-seven days at eight metres a day two thousand one hundred and thirty-six metres in all one circuit of the cellar at ground level one on the first gallery half on the second and on the two hundred and sixty-seventh morning daylight in the decanting room independent existence-so called but in the interval mr foster concluded we ve managed to do a lot to them oh a very great deal his laugh was knowing and triumphant that s the spirit i like said the director once more let s walk around you tell them everything mr foster http www.idph.net[close]
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idph mr foster duly told them 11 told them of the growing embryo on its bed of peritoneum made them taste the rich blood surrogate on which it fed explained why it had to be stimulated with placentin and thyroxin told them of the corpus luteum extract showed them the jets through which at every twelfth metre from zero to 2040 it was automatically injected spoke of those gradually increasing doses of pituitary administered during the final ninety-six metres of their course described the artificial maternal circulation installed in every bottle at metre 112 showed them the resevoir of blood surrogate the centrifugal pump that kept the liquid moving over the placenta and drove it through the synthetic lung and waste product filter referred to the embryo s troublesome tendency to anæmia to the massive doses of hog s stomach extract and foetal foal s liver with which in consequence it had to be supplied showed them the simple mechanism by means of which during the last two metres out of every eight all the embryos were simultaneously shaken into familiarity with movement hinted at the gravity of the so-called trauma of decanting and enumerated the precautions taken to minimize by a suitable training of the bottled embryo that dangerous shock told them of the test for sex carried out in the neighborhood of metre 200 explained the system of labelling-a t for the males a circle for the females and for those who were destined to become freemartins a question mark black on a white ground for of course said mr foster in the vast majority of cases fertility is merely a nuisance one fertile ovary in twelve hundred-that would really be quite sufficient for our purposes but we want to have a good choice and of course one must always have an enormous margin of safety so we allow as many as thirty per cent of the female embryos to develop normally the others get a dose of male sex-hormone every twenty-four metres for the rest of the course result they re decanted as freemartins-structurally quite normal except he had to admit that they do have the slightest tendency to grow beards but sterile guaranteed sterile which brings us at last continued mr foster out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention he rubbed his hands for of course they didn t content themselves with merely hatching out embryos any cow could do that we also predestine and condition we decant our babies as socialized human beings as alphas or epsilons as future sewage workers or future he was going to say future world controllers but correcting himself said future directors of hatcheries instead the d.h.c acknowledged the compliment with a smile http www.idph.net[close]
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12 idph they were passing metre 320 on rack 11 a young beta-minus mechanic was busy with screw-driver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a passing bottle the hum of the electric motor deepened by fractions of a tone as he turned the nuts down down a final twist a glance at the revolution counter and he was done he moved two paces down the line and began the same process on the next pump reducing the number of revolutions per minute mr foster explained the surrogate goes round slower therefore passes through the lung at longer intervals therefore gives the embryo less oxygen nothing like oxygen shortage for keeping an embryo below par again he rubbed his hands but why do you want to keep the embryo below par asked an ingenuous student ass said the director breaking a long silence hasn t it occurred to you that an epsilon embryo must have an epsilon environment as well as an epsilon heredity it evidently hadn t occurred to him he was covered with confusion the lower the caste said mr foster the shorter the oxygen the first organ affected was the brain after that the skeleton at seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs at less than seventy eyeless monsters who are no use at all concluded mr foster whereas his voice became confidential and eager if they could discover a technique for shortening the period of maturation what a triumph what a benefaction to society consider the horse they considered it mature at six the elephant at ten while at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature and is only full-grown at twenty hence of course that fruit of delayed development the human intelligence but in epsilons said mr foster very justly we don t need human intelligence didn t need and didn t get it but though the epsilon mind was mature at ten the epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity if the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick say as a cow s what an enormous saving to the community enormous murmured the students mr foster s enthusiasm was infectious he became rather technical spoke of the abnormal endocrine co-ordination http www.idph.net[close]
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idph 13 which made men grow so slowly postulated a germinal mutation to account for it could the effects of this germinal mutation be undone could the individual epsilon embryo be made a revert by a suitable technique to the normality of dogs and cows that was the problem and it was all but solved pilkington at mombasa had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half a scientific triumph but socially useless six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even epsilon work and the process was an all-or-nothing one either you failed to modify at all or else you modified the whole way they were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six so far without success mr foster sighed and shook his head their wanderings through the crimson twilight had brought them to the neighborhood of metre 170 on rack 9 from this point onwards rack 9 was enclosed and the bottle performed the remainder of their journey in a kind of tunnel interrupted here and there by openings two or three metres wide heat conditioning said mr foster hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard x-rays by the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold they were predestined to emigrate to the tropics to be miner and acetate silk spinners and steel workers later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies we condition them to thrive on heat concluded mr foster our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it and that put in the director sententiously that is the secret of happiness and virtue-liking what you ve got to do all conditioning aims at that making people like their unescapable social destiny in a gap between two tunnels a nurse was delicately probing with a long fine syringe into the gelatinous contents of a passing bottle the students and their guides stood watching her for a few moments in silence well lenina said mr foster when at last she withdrew the syringe and straightened herself up the girl turned with a start one could see that for all the lupus and the purple eyes she was uncommonly pretty henry her smile flashed redly at him-a row of coral teeth charming charming murmured the director and giving her two or three little pats received in exchange a rather deferential smile for himself what are you giving them asked mr foster making his tone very professi http www.idph.net[close]
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14 onal oh the usual typhoid and sleeping sickness idph tropical workers start being inoculated at metre 150 mr foster explained to the students the embryos still have gills we immunize the fish against the future man s diseases then turning back to lenina ten to five on the roof this afternoon he said as usual charming said the dhector once more and with a final pat moved away after the others on rack 10 rows of next generation s chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead caustic soda tar chlorine the first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on rack 3 a special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation to improve their sense of balance mr foster explained doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job we slacken off the circulation when they re right way up so that they re half starved and double the flow of surrogate when they re upside down they learn to associate topsy-turvydom with weli-being in fact they re only truly happy when they re standing on their heads and now mr foster went on i d like to show you some very interesting conditioning for alpha plus intellectuals we have a big batch of them on rack 5 first gallery level he called to two boys who had started to go down to the ground floor they re round about metre 900 he explained you can t really do any useful intellectual conditioning till the foetuses have lost their tails follow me but the director had looked at his watch ten to three he said no time for the intellectual embryos i m afraid we must go up to the nurseries before the children have finished their afternoon sleep mr foster was disappointed at least one glance at the decanting room he pleaded very well then the director smiled indulgently just one glance http www.idph.net[close]
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two mr foster was left in the decanting room the d.h.c and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor infant nurseries neo-pavlovian conditioning rooms announced the notice board the director opened a door they were in a large bare room very bright and sunny for the whole of the southern wall was a single window half a dozen nurses trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform their hair aseptically hidden under white caps were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor big bowls packed tight with blossom thousands of petals ripe-blown and silkily smooth like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs but of cherubs in that bright light not exclusively pink and aryan but also luminously chinese also mexican also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets also pale as death pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble the nurses stiffened to attention as the d.h.c came in set out the books he said curtly in silence the nurses obeyed his command between the rose bowls the books were duly set out-a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird now bring in the children they hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden on all its four wire-netted shelves with eightmonth-old babies all exactly alike a bokanovsky group it was evident and all since their caste was delta dressed in khaki put them down on the floor the infants were unloaded 15[close]
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